Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions?
The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility—or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it.
Spout racialist nonsense for 40 years? Harass women and young girls by blowing in their hair and squeezing them too tightly? Create a family grifting syndicate to leverage foreign cash in quid pro quo fashion? Praise racial segregationists?
Joe Biden did all those things and more. But he also did them in service to a supposed noble cause, sort of like the current board president of the NAACP promoting a black travel ban on Florida, while he lives—in Florida!
Keep political utility in mind and the baffling hypocrisy of the Left makes all too perfect sense.
January 6 vs. the “Summer of Love”
From all the tens of thousands of January 6 Capitol protesters a small percentage entered the Capitol itself. Of that group, an even smaller number committed violent acts. Most of those seriously injured that day were among the protesters themselves. Despite official propaganda, there were not five police officers killed on January 6 as alleged by the Left.
Instead, the only likely death at the hand of another was the diminutive, 5’2’’, 14-year-military veteran and unarmed Ashli Babbitt. She was lethally shot by a Capitol officer Michael Byrd for the likely misdemeanor of trespassing and—illegally entering a broken window to the Capitol.
Yet over a thousand protesters were arrested, tried, and mostly convicted of various charges from parading without a permit to insurrection. Many of them were sentenced to long prison sentences. Some may spend most of their remaining lives in prison.
The Left has justified long sentences on three grounds: One, the protesters targeted iconic government buildings as the object of their attacks. Two, the protesters were ideologically motivated and seemed bent on insurrection to warp the political process. Three, the protesters were attempting to nullify an election by their massing at the Capitol and therefore questioned the very integrity of the 2020 election.
In theory these were legitimate reasons to treat harshly any convicted of such insurrectionary crimes. But in reality, the Left cared little about its pretexts justifying harsh responses, much less proving their charges. What mattered were the political opportunities offered by January 6, and the chance to leverage the occasion to consolidate power.
Why and how can one assume that?
In 2020, for 120 days, left-wing mobs led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter wrought far greater destruction in nonstop rioting, arson, looting, and assault. Over 35 people died. Two billion dollars in property damage followed. Some 1,500 officers were assaulted and injured. Over 14,000 protesters were arrested.
Yet few were convicted of any serious crimes; fewer were sentenced to long sentences—given prosecutors, state and federal, claimed the violence was merely a result of protesters exercising their “constitutional right” of dissent.
Left-wing politicians and activists from then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”) to Nikole Hannah Jones (“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”) either excused the often violent protests or urged that they continue.
Far from sending in 20,000 federal troops, as occurred after January 6, the Left demanded that then President Trump not resort to such Draconian measures.
Note that there were lots of government properties deliberately targeted in iconic fashion. A Seattle police precinct (with officers inside ) was set afire. A mob in Washington, D.C. tried to storm the White House grounds in a fashion that sent the president and secret service agents into a subterranean bunker. A historic Washington, D.C. church was torched. Violent mobs set federal and state courthouses on fire in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Portland.
Second, note these riots and violence were not random. They were coordinated and seemed to wax and wane with some sort of precise coordination—a fact deemed useful in an election year by the Democratic Left.
In her now notorious self-confessional Time essay, Molly Ball bragged that, “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.” “The conversation that followed was a difficult one,” Ball explained, “led by the activists charged with the protest strategy . . . We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street.”
Third, had Trump won the 2020 election, the Left was gearing up for yet another round of violence under the pretense that the election had been stolen, in the fashion of its coordinated Washington, D.C. violence on the day of Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
Left-wing election denialism—and real efforts to overturn a presidential election—were certainly not new. After the 2016 election, wealthy leftists and celebrities ran television ads begging electors to reject their constitutional fidelity and the popular vote counts in their states, and instead, in insurrectionary style, cast electoral ballots for Hillary Clinton.
Prominent leftists from Jimmy Carter to Hillary Clinton also had been on record following the 2016 election claiming that Trump was an illegitimate president and the 2016 election had been rigged in Trump’s favor due to the hoax of Russian collusion.
Hillary Clinton—who paid Christopher Steele to use Clinton-related fake sources to compile fabrications and destroy her 2016 rival—later even bragged she was joining “La Résistance.” The chairman of the January 6 committee that damned Trump’s supposed election denialism, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), himself was an election denialist par excellence, who absurdly voted in the Congress to reject George Bush’s popular vote victory in Ohio that decided the 2004 election.
By any fair measure the violence of 2020 was a far greater and more deadly threat to the republic than anything occurring on January 6, 2021. But most of the 14,000 arrested perpetrators who were responsible for that incredible summer of violence were exempted because their mayhem was deemed politically useful—in the same fashion it was advantageous to turn the buffoonish Capitol protesters into seasoned revolutionaries. The common denominator was only the Left’s efforts to warp events to achieve power.
Liberalism That Loses Utility is Left Behind
California has been building massive solar farms in pristine deserts and rural areas. Many spread over thousands of acres and require disruptive supporting infrastructure. In the American Midwest, these new generations of solar farms are unlike anything in our recent past. Often in size larger than Manhattan, they take out of production tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland.
What is curious about all these next-generation projects is the relative silence of environmentalists to the radical disruptions and dangers they pose to fragile and pristine natural landscapes, rare species of flora and fauna, and quality of life for surrounding rural communities.
In the case of hundreds of thousands of lost farm acres, prior liberal advocacy for preserving America’s heartland, and its precious family farm acreage and those who work it, likewise go out the window.
Yet if any clean-burning natural gas plant, affordable housing development, a border wall, retirement community, or farming operation caused as much havoc to the environment as solar—and often wind—farms, there would arise leftist outrage replete with environmentalist-driven court injunctions. In other words, left-wing environmentalism is calibrated only by whether the Left or the Right is reengineering the landscape.
Title IX was an addendum to the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. Through liberal lawsuits and the intervention of activist courts, the statute soon was transmogrified into a sports equity act. Title IX then began to revolutionize high school and college sports programs by demanding equity—in the sense of mandating equal budgets and facilities for women’s and men’s sports.
The rationale was that women’s athletics could only achieve parity with male sports if they were gifted the same sorts of budgets, infrastructure, and institutional support. Whatever the intent of the original statute, whatever the effects of activist court intervention, the result was that women’s sports did achieve a much higher social and cultural profile.
So how ironic, then, that a half-century of athletic transformation has been completely undermined by the current ritual takeover of the sport by biological men declaring themselves transgendered women. The transgendered have done more damage in three years to women’s sports than a century of chauvinist pigs.
In almost every category of competition—track and field, swimming, team sports—prior women’s records have been shattered by athletes who enjoy huge advantages in natural musculoskeletal mass, body size and weight, and innate strength. In the Cold War past, males competing as females were largely a Soviet or Eastern European phenomenon—most notably the Ukrainian sisters, Tamara and Irina Press. The communist bloc, as the Third Reich had earlier in the case of Heinrich Ratjen, scored propaganda points by using males to win “women’s” events.
Soon in reaction, hormonal testing and eventually DNA tests were used to ensure an equal playing field for biological women. No matter. What was once a feminist issue is now considered a right-wing hate crime of insisting that biological males not be allowed simply to redefine an entire segment of American life and culture.
Note that the Left has sided against feminism in its near hysterical promotion of its newest cause célèbre, transgenderism. Note further that biological women do not win many, if any, events as transgendered males, despite the shibboleth that one can construct one’s own sexual identity that will be equivalent to a biological one.
Finally, note that there is no transgendered effort to create a separate category of transgendered sports. Apparently a transgendered Olympics or NCAA event would not offer transgendered contestants and champions the attention and lucre they now achieve by dominating women’s sports. Again, “equity” and feminism were never left-wing positions, but simply useful malleable issues to embrace or reject depending on where and how contemporary political advantage was calibrated.
From Reining in Government Abuse to Cheering It
Read the contemporary news accounts of the 1975-76 so-called “Church Committee,” a select Senate committee formed to expose and rectify dangerous abuses of civil rights and constitutional norms by the CIA, NSA, and at times the FBI.
Most Democrats cheered the post-Watergate committee on, eager to virtue signal as civil libertarians and to stop the rogue and often politically weaponized antics of our investigatory and intelligence agencies.
But while there were true civil libertarians, Left and Right, who weighed in on the committee, the general left-wing giddiness over the investigations was predicated on the post-Watergate Democratic revival—one that ensued from ridding the nation of Richard Nixon and using his disgrace to discredit what were considered conservative institutions.
Fast forward to 2015-23. Over the last eight years it is hard to imagine any illegal act that the CIA, NSA, or FBI would not commit. Their directors—James Clapper, John Brennan, and Andrew McCabe—have all confessed to lying under oath. A more insidious Robert Mueller, James Comey, and Christopher Wray simply invoke amnesiac excuses or plead ignorance when asked directly about the wrongdoing of their agencies or investigations.
The U.S. government, along with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, paid a foreign national to spy on a rival campaign, compile lies about a rival candidate, and then spread them through government and the media. The FBI arguably sought to alter both the 2016 and 2020 elections.
In this same eight-year period, a FISA court was deluded, and an FBI lawyer altered court documents. Phone records were wiped clean. Subpoenaed devices were destroyed. Key evidence that affected a current campaign was put under FBI wraps. Agents openly texted their intent to ensure a predetermined presidential election result. Americans in general were routinely spied upon. Many were framed by FBI skullduggery and had their lives ruined.
The extent of the lawbreaking and the warping of elections dwarfs anything discovered during Watergate. And yet the Left never objected to these violations of civil rights or the illegal freelancing of intelligence agencies. Far from it—the Left cheered on the illegality.
Why? Because for them hating or worshiping the CIA, NSA, and FBI—or for that matter the Pentagon, IRS, and Justice Department—was never a matter of consistent principle. Instead these bureaucracies were deemed pathological when associated with conservatism and traditionalism, and angelic when their extralegal efforts were put to use for the progressive agenda.
There are some grassroots leftists who are deluded into sincerely believing “equity” can be achieved by government confiscation and redistribution. But for most of the elite, the cause is a means to personal and professional power, a fact that explains why one day walking only on four leftist legs is alone correct, the next day just two.
In summary, the left is corrupt, invigorated, determined, and relentless. It appears the head of the GOP is doing nothing to plan a strategy to outgame the dems in ballot harvesting, uncontrolled ballot boxes, obfuscation of chain of custody and computer fraud. We have to win in 2024 but need to outsmart the left at the ballot box.
There are four boxes of Liberty, soap box, ballot box, jury box and cartridge box, which one are on currently?
The head of the GOP is an airhead by the name of Mitch McCornball (misspelling intentional). He pretends otherwise, but he is a charter member of the letist pack. McCarthy, the GOP House Speaker, is little better, despite much posturing to be a “tough guy.” The GOP is pathetically inept and has been since the Reagan days ended. The GOP is a joke….a big, pathetic joke.
So there you have it. Bang on. It all starts and stops with winning elections. The left will indeed do anything. Maybe using this column to give Kari Lake and her election experience a platform would help? Just asking, for a friend.
The Lefts HAVE to win or they will be completely exposed! What a sad state of affairs. Our Founding Father’s would be turning in their graves!!
We have entered into an age of Anti-Rationalism in America and indeed, the rest of the Western Civilization. If the end of the Thirty Years War was to bring an end to wars of religious extinction and the introduction of the Enlightenment to Western Civilization, then this new progressive era is now bringing to us wars of religious like ideology and the extinction not only of conservative thinking but also the extinction of those who would believe in such values. Any opposition to any progressive ideology is to be treated as heresy and death to the defiler. It was a common refrain in the middle ages from the Catholic church that one cannot argue with the devil, that the devil should be banished from society and his followers sent to meet their maker. Our own country is left with no middle ground and no means of conciliation save internecine violence until one side emerges victorious, assuming such a war would concede such a victory as desirable.
Their denial of biology, genes, dna, definition of social construct, and logic is indeed bewildering and at once hilarious.
Dear Dr. Hanson,
To the best of my knowledge, some of your account of the Soviet-era sports is factually incorrect. Sisters Press likely were biological females, at least according to archival documents uncovered after the fall of the Soviet Union. East German female athletics champions definitely were biological females, who were treated with large doses of male hormones. As a result, they had acquired male characteristics and were consistently winning events in female sports.
Succinct, accurate and precise, unlike Bidenspeak.
These problems are rooted in the universities whose message for the past 50 years has been that American is evil and as graduates you must change her course. No longer is critical thinking nor even developing technical skills a college priority. Racial discrimination, once on the decline, is the rule of the day. Gifted with tax exemptions, government grants, and monopolistic pricing these institutions of higher learning are setting “standards” for our government, our corporations, our media and entertainers. We follow Greece, Rome, and other civilizations into an abyss
Time for the educators to study and learn from history.
higher ed has gone over to indoctrination, not education and is thus suspect through and through.
Seems as though the current Administration is neither Democrat nor Republican, but a third unknown and undeclared party.
I think demos means the ‘common people’ and republic means ‘public representatives’, but who are these corporate representatives – corporats / corporatic party?
Can they be declared illegitimate?
Biden Crime Inc.
Two truisms regarding hypocritical politics –
To show partiality is not good, but for a piece of bread a man will do wrong.
Proverbs 28:21
By justice a king builds up the land, but he who exacts gifts tears it down.
Proverbs 29:4
This article describes a tyrannical government. A president who says he would use F15s against AR15s of the people, is tyrannical. The very reason for the Founders 2nd Amendment. We accept 35,000 vehicle deaths annually. It is our very civilization. That same civilization exists only when the people can out gun the tyrannical government. Vehicle deaths/gun deaths are both facts of our civilization. A civilization “Gone With The Wind”.
We live in an age of sound bites. They get attention and the liberal extremists (most democrats) never fail to describe conservatives as the maga extremist republicans, over and over again. Rarely if ever do we respond in kind. Why not? This may be all the low-information voters will ever hear so the impression is formed, the democrats may be bad but they are better than the maga republican extremists. Why don’t we start claiming that Biden, is the extremist, he has blood on his hands deliberately responsible for the fentanyl deaths of over 70,000 Americans per year, and deliberately responsible for thousands of women and girls being raped by human traffickers at the border due to his insane extremist policies, all to insure more left-wing future voters. When Biden lies, which he does frequently, why don’t we hear the simple reply, that is just another Biden lie?
The problem is MSM won’t broadcast anything derogatory, true or not, about the democrats and many of the big tech platforms ban anything unfavorable as hate speech and block accounts.
You are right!
Since Biden has been POTUS I have been posting to FB info I’m sure my Dem friends (almost all) know nothing about (after 4 Trump years when I was exposed to the worst, most disgusting cartoons and comments, to which I always responded firmly and rationally). I have to date not received a single comment on my posts – neither negative nor positive. I can only hope that someone is reading them and something will sink in. I will continue, though my husband says they’re going to come and knock down our door one day.
Victor, you wrote, “In this same eight-year period, a FISA court was deluded,…”.
Why are you just assuming that they were deluded? Why couldn’t they be weaponized as have been the case for so many other useful government agencies?
If they the FISA court was deluded, as you contend, I would have expected expressed outrage from them for being duped by the FBI. Yet, I have not heard or read of any expressed outrage. This makes me suspect that they too, were weaponized.
All of this is true. Everyone knows it. The Democrats are the traitors. The whole world knows this. BUT the question I keep asking that No One ever answers is this. What do Americans DO? More voting? So how did that work for you? Are we doomed? Do we just keep going to the voting booth month after month, year after year??? And nothing changes??? What???
Some smart lawyers need to craft a case that addresses these issues and get that before the Supreme Court. Will take some ingenuity.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? The crimes committed by these Institutions who worked for the Obamas, the Clintons & the Bidens & to top it all off, we find that the Bidens have a Mafia-style family setup sets up a quandary for me. I know that hurling the word Treason at a person or persons isn’t something I’ve ever done & I don’t believe that Joe Biden & his disgusting family are the only ones who have committed Treason! I believe that the Department Heads of these Institutions should also be charged with Treason… They knew about all of it & they allowed it to happen & they even helped to facilitate these crimes!
I don’t hear the media reporting on what is the worst scandal in the History of the United States of America!
I’ve been hearing some trying to compare this scandal to Watergate, but there’s no comparison! Richard Nixon, love him or hate him was never a Traitor to America
NO, Nixon wasn’t. The Washington Post and others had plenty of appetite to get the dirt on him when it came to Watergate, didn’t they?
Yet, they have no such appetite when it comes to investigating the dealings of the Bidens. Shameful!
It was a gigantic mistake to allow women to vote. They are, and will be into the distant future very very easy to manipulate. I don’t believe that most blacks vote at all. Women voters and election fraud.
I agree with you Jack- and I am a woman. Too uninformed and emotional.
Sounds like most men too.
Misogynist. Cite some facts or the requisite Chesterton essay to support your assertion.
The problem is not easily-influenced women, but weak men. I know so many white male Lefties who are vocal about their politics and action oriented. And I know so many conservative-voting white men who don’t go to church, don’t lead at home, and don’t speak anything but accepted narrative in public. Those weak men are not influencing anyone. They are whining about Democrat women.
Whoa Jack, you may have hit some nerves here. I will be sure and check back to see what comments respond to your post.
Yeah. I’m still waiting for my Chesterton essay.
No matter what you thought of the man, the time for words was over November 22, 1963. I was a child and didn’t know how to express it but in my gut I knew something was deathly wrong and no one did anything about it. That was the day our country died. These are only the death throws as a chicken missing its head.
You sir, with total respect are not cancelled and muzzled having been chosen the town crier, heralding in the inevitable. The only reason that you have not been canceled on youtube. Anyone that doesn’t have your reach and not having learned where the line is has been canceled and punished.
They no longer have to murder the prophets – they just cut their voice off.
So, how many conservative American lives, would the left be willing to “give up”, to assure permanent political power? Are any of those lives considered prescious, worthwhile, or deserving … of even life itself? Watch what they do, and how they do it, to anyone who presents a threat to their power, or merely even a “speedbump” on the way to their goals.
Remember who they are. Their mantra is the same as every political mass murderer in history, from Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot: “The ends justifies the means”, i.e. meaning that “No, you don’t count. I count.” To what extent are we willing to defend ourselves, block them, and defeat them? We’d better figure out the answer to that question as a group, before each one of us individually faces the left’s various executioners (DOJ/FBI/DHS/State and Local LEO’s/BLM/ANTIFA/or whoever the left elevates next to carry their flag). Much as this sounds like both a nightmare, and some inane rant, they WILL, in fact, do it to you. Believe their history, not their words.
Intelligent rational discourse.
The “class” of ’68….where do we start?
Brookings 1960? No, it wasn’t silver certificates and nuclear programs. (NEVER reveal the true history of man)
I didn’t agree w/Engel 1962-and I wasn’t asked. We were ra_ped.
JFK/MLK/RFK/MalconX….maybe a Nixon and a quarter of a Reagan on the side?
“…I’ll have THEM voting democrat for the next 200 years!”
Their sacrifice of 65 million innocents to Molloch? Cementing in their permapower until His return?
And their “legacy” of “plain brown wrapper” porn(60’s) and drugs(70’s)?
Then there’s the bad stuff….
They “bought the world a coke, and taught it to sing in three part harmony!”
They “bought the world a coke, and kept it company.”
Now, the broken Coke bottle is lodged in the right kidney of the pretty little blonde, named Liberty, and we’re 58 minutes into the “golden” hour…NOW what?
TERRIBLE, (but necessary) decisions HAVE to be made about “others”, IF we choose to continue to exist, as well as the family of man….
CHOOSE wisely….
EDIT:
Almost forgot, ol’ Pauli was on my 90’s era website-let’s review again:
Calculation:
Texas has 261,914 square miles of land.
The world has 6,255,121,726 people.
If everyone in the world moved to Texas, the density would be 23,882 people per square mile.
Brooklyn New York has a population density of 35,219 people per square mile.
So, is that enough truth for you? MR. ERLICH! Screw Earth day 1970.
Next, we take on the rape known as global warming.
Our side doesn’t need another talking head whining about how our lunch money was stolen. What we need is someone to call for action that has a prayer of succeeding.
I contend that we need to use our popular majorities in 38 states to change our country from a false democracy to a truedemocracynow.com where every voter is a member of congress for their community via govtbysmartphone and no community can be canceled by another or the ‘federal govt’. This way, disparate groups can live in harmony side by side b/c this fight to the death to control everything is essentially over. We lost. And our only shot is a conventionofstates.com
The same people who were all about Women’s Lib are silent about men competing women out of women’s sports.
I just heard that Biden Admin. is going to build a military base in Iraq (I guess supposed to cover for strategic, state-of-the-art Bagram that we squandered?) at the same time that Iraq is choosing to trade with the Chinese yuan not US dollar.
Up is down, right is left.
In 1962, John F. Kennedy famously said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
And now we know that more film existed which, with modern technology, could have shown what really did (or didn’t) come from the “grassy knoll”.
But access to it has been denied by the government which had control over it.
What does this suggest?
It seems the problem is on the right. We simply are unwilling or unable to fight. We don’t even understand who the enemy is to be honest. And our Republican political leaders are worthless for the most part. But we continue to elect them. So in a way, it really is our own fault.
Dear Mr. Hanson,
I am a family man, small businessman, friend and community volunteer.
I have read and admired your work for many years. And, like most of my professors at Wabash College, almost 50 years ago, you are a teacher and your words make me think and wonder. And, as you know, there is a huge shortage of thinking and wondering in America.
I have been a (minuscule) foe of the Corrupt Teachers’ Unions since I was in high school and continue to “wonder” why Americans have metaphorically just “rolled over” and given their precious children to the marginally educated educators, their corrupt unions and our fumbling and bumbling “Government”.
So, given your national platform, multiple skill sets and fierce independence, I hope you will continue to focus more of your keen critical thinking skills on this unionized cancer that affects our great nation every single day.
We have lost the battle for the financial stability of our country, but we must fight to save the future of our kids. We cannot continue to lose that battle!
Finally, Mr. Hanson, I do not trust many humans, but even though I do not “know” you, I trust you. Otherwise, I trust a few humans, children and dogs.
I am blessed to have lived most of my life in Broken Arrow, OK. and the Yampa Valley—home to my beloved Steamboat Springs, CO.—where I always keep an eye out for John Galt and his gang.
Thank you for your courage. As many have said, “you are a national treasure”.
Randy Swearengin
918-640-2563
Dr. Hanson.
You are my favorite apologist for rational governance, historical relevance, and a strong advocate for Sane verses Insane discourse.
I can honestly say that when I read your articles they resonate within me. You expose the things I want to say and say it with a much greater excellence.
I have like many of my peers are living in this manufactured Dystopia of the Marxist Left operating openly under the cover of a Democrat Party label. The biggest change is that deception is no longer necessary they have no concern for any potential backlash let along criminal conviction for breaking the law.
The Rules for Radicals are their New Testament, a testament to the true depravity of man.
well said article and comments
I love reading VDH. I keep waiting to read his ideas for SOLUTIONS. What can we do?
Only a non-politician can put us on the path out of this vile mess.
VDH is The General of Captain Obvious drivel.
What say you Captain Obvious?
How does the country get saved from the doom we are hurtling towards and who is the man (or woman) to lead the war against the evil vermin?
We have nothing to fear from the politicians themselves, they can and are replaced, coming and going like so many tourists, granted, some overstay their welcome by decades, but it’s not the politicians we have to fear. Fear the zealots in the, schools and universities, in the bureaucracy and in the polling places that remain at their posts, willing to do anything to achieve their ends, and fear an electorate so dumbed down by an education system so corrupted by Marxist ideology, that the mere display of an American flag has become hateful to them, that they vote for their own subjugation.
“I didn’t leave the Democrat party, the Democrat party left me.” R.W. Reagan
“When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” – G.K. Chesterton
Thus, some notion of “love” is let loose and it attaches to behavior that under a Christian scheme, would be undeniably grotesque. Thus some notion of “justice” is loosed also from its Christian moorings and sets about enslaving real Justice, based on behaviors, to justice based on skin-color and “victim-status”; “diversity, inclusivity, and equity”, i.e. D.I.E. and I could go on and on and on. Masons, Marxists, skeptics, atheists, haters of God and goodness have sown the seed of discontent into the wind and our generation is reaping the whirlwind.
George Orwell in his book and movie “1984” put it very well when he described “doublethink” as the ability to hold two contrary opinions simultaneously. In the present era, the Left and perhaps too the Right sometimes express contrary opinions in the same speech, article, or email.
The left were never actually Liberals. Like Islamics claiming Christian holy sites as their own, around 1900 Marxists – under seige around the world and looking for a way to hide – slapped together a regurgitation of Marxism and called it “Social Liberalism,” claiming it to be the “next step in Liberalism.” In fact, it was the antithesis of Liberalism – big powerful government, limited individual rights, high taxes, little freedom, the subjective rule of law. Only because of a careful campaign of propaganda did they succeed in convincing the world that Liberalism meant Communism – a feat which would have impressed George Orwell for their doublespeak.
If you know you are right, consistency or principle is extraneous and dialog is unnecessary.
Conservatives believe that liberty is the highest and best expression of humanity. Progressives believe government is the highest and best expression of humanity.
Two sides of Western Thought hammering away at each other like Plato and Homer.